How to achieve a predictable pipeline: 9 tips for sales and marketing leaders

At Belkins, most sales and marketing leaders we speak with have pipeline anxiety. 

Their tight budgets demand frugal spending, yet growth targets are high and over 50% of sales reps miss their quotas because they lack high-quality pipeline opportunities.

In the past, businesses had more time to build pipelines. With ample VC funding, companies could burn cash testing product-market fit or scaling services and then optimize customer acquisition cost (CAC) later. Today, that luxury is gone. 

The availability of fewer resources and limited runway means businesses must get CAC under control within 3 to 6 months — a timeline that once stretched a couple of years. This shift has made efficient and predictable pipeline growth non-negotiable for product- and service-based companies.

Here, we’ll reveal the strategies that help us maintain year-on-year growth. Drawing on insights from five of Belkins’ internal experts — including industry leaders — we’ll share how you can build a sustainable pipeline that drives business growth.

9 proven ways to ensure a predictable pipeline

Set ambitious but realistic revenue goals

A SMART goal motivates and challenges your team to do better. Such a goal curtails burnout that could cause the prioritization of pipeline quantity over quality. To keep our revenue goal realistic, we first consider our total addressable market (TAM).

Our vast market lets us have a high pipeline coverage ratio of up to 10X — well above the 3X to 4X industry standard. So, if our monthly goal is to generate $1,000,000 in new revenue, we aim for $10,000,000 in the pipeline. Similarly, if we want 50 new clients, we need an average of 500 new opportunities.

The TAM and pipeline coverage also impact team size. Assuming our marketing team currently generates an average of 100 new opportunities per month and we have two account executives (AEs) with a monthly capacity of 100 leads each, then we know we may need to tweak our strategy, invest more in pipeline generation, and hire more AEs to close the new opportunities. 

📚 Related post: How to set realistic & achievable appointment setting goals 

Revisit your ICP, buyer persona, and lead qualification criteria

Market conditions and buyers’ priorities shift. Your ICP from 12 months ago might be outdated. If your pipeline is drying up or your messaging isn’t working, your ICP or buyer persona could be out of sync with the market.

Brian Hicks, Belkins’ VP of sales, recommends reviewing these at least once a year. This exercise is even more critical for new-to-market products, as your initial assumptions about your ideal customer might be wrong:

As Julia Sorokovikova, Belkins’ head of sales operations clarifies, this doesn’t mean you have to change your ICP every time you review it.

The following three-step approach will help you confirm your ICP and attract more of them:

• Identify top customers. Focus on clients who have renewed their contracts at least once annually, have high lifetime value, and have expressed satisfaction with your services.
• Analyze common characteristics. Do this to identify common patterns by evaluating each company’s industry, employee count, revenue range, funding details, tech stack, etc.
• Conduct in-depth customer interviews. Engage with clients who fit your ICP criteria to gain deeper insights. Ask questions like:
  • What did you first notice that made us stand out?
  • What challenges were you facing that made you explore our solution?
  • What outcomes were you hoping to achieve by working with us?
  • What concerns or objections did you or your team have before you decided to work with us?
  • What impact(s) has our solution had on your business?

These questions uncover what creates customer retention, the value you bring, your customer pain points, and how they perceive your offering. Such insights help you target similar customers and refine your messaging, outreach tactics, and differentiation strategy.

📚 Related post: How to create an ideal customer profile (ICP) for a B2B company

Implement an effective pipeline management process

Many businesses overlook the importance of a well-managed sales pipeline. Their CRMs are outdated and cluttered with decayed data. Their sales teams waste hours on administrative tasks that could be automated. Winnable deals slip through the cracks due to poor follow-up. 

These problems exist because a structured pipeline management process is absent. To fix this, focus on five key areas:

1. Weekly forecasting and review meetings

Setting a goal and hoping for the best is a losing strategy. Julia explains:

However, if you find major deviations in your pipeline, dig into the CRM to understand what’s going wrong. For such situations, Julia told me that she might check if Belkins is getting enough leads from marketing, examine each sales rep’s quota attainment, inspect the deals in her sales reps’ pipelines, and talk to them about their confidence in hitting their goals.

Here’s a hypothetical weekly review showing how we predict our pipeline.

In January, we fell short on qualified deals but exceeded our conversion rate to meetings — good news. However, by mid-February, we hadn’t hit 30% of our ’deals qualified’ goal.

Weekly reviews don’t guarantee we’ll be fully prepared for all unusual situations, but they help us identify gaps early and address common patterns.

2. Systematize your sales process

“The absence of a sales process puts teams in ’guess mode’ constantly,” says Yuriy. “You don’t know your next steps after the sales call; there is no specific timeline, so your sales cycle is unpredictable, and you lose opportunities.” 

Even Brian admits he overlooked this for a long time:

Start by defining your pipeline stages. At Belkins, we have 11 sequential steps that give our reps a clear direction for advancing deals.

When your CRM organizes opportunities by deal stage, it eliminates ambiguity about priorities — focus on late-stage deals first (e.g., awaiting payment or contract sent) and work backward.

3. Regularly update your CRM

A regularly updated CRM makes it easier for sales managers to track progress and forecast accurately. Because we ensure our SEs update prospect interactions in their CRM in real-time, Julia can view the opportunities in the overall pipeline or the pipeline of each sales rep and build sales reports. 

Below is a screenshot of our main sales KPI dashboard on HubSpot.

From this dashboard, Julia sees that we have 20 clients in our “Contract send” stage. Since we close 70% of deals in this stage, she can predict our new revenue for the next 4–6 weeks, depending on the negotiation stage. 

CRM data cleaning is another crucial part of a good CRM update routine. As Brian asserts,

For context, about 10% of the contacts on Belkins HubSpot are bounced contacts.

4. Automate wherever possible

Old-fashioned tech stacks are a leading cause of pipeline unpredictability in the enterprise-sized companies we encounter. As basic as this may sound, Yuriy says you may find companies that “don’t have Calendly or HubSpot calendar integrated. So they can’t create a round robin to avoid thinking about which sales reps should take a call or how to evenly distribute calls among sales reps.” 

At Belkins, we aim to automate every repetitive task, including:

• Data enrichment and lead scoring. We integrate our HubSpot CRM with Apollo. This helps us automatically enrich prospect data in our CRM. We also score leads based on their industry, company size, and other ICP data and qualify them before our BDRs do the final manual qualification.
• Reassigning no-shows to BDRs. The time spent on manual reassignment adds up over time, especially when handling 100s of leads monthly. 

• Follow-up reminders. If a prospect says, “reach out at the end of Q1,” we set a reminder to ensure timely follow-up. Relying on memory isn’t an option because our AEs manage an average of 150 opportunities at a time. Our CRMs also automatically remind AEs to follow up on deals with more than two weeks of inactivity.

5. Assign a dedicated pipeline manager

Our account executives have two main tasks: communicating with prospects to close them and logging all interactions on their CRM. Everything else is a distraction. 

That’s why you need a sales operations team handling admin tasks — like follow-ups, building automation, CRM data cleaning, moving deals through the pipeline, and ensuring that crucial deal fields are filled out in your CRM.

Optimize your sales and marketing processes

A systemized sales process isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it deal. Continuous optimization can drive big results.

💡 Case in point

One tool — ChiliPiper’s Concierge — spiked our lead-to-appointment conversion rate by 50%.

Before Concierge, our “Book a call” workflow was like most: After filling out a form, prospects saw a generic “Thank you. Someone will contact you soon.” The problem? Companies using this workflow lose about 60% of their inbound prospects, according to Alina Vandenberghe, Chili Piper’s co-founder. What a waste!

Now, Concierge lets us instantly qualify inbound leads and route them to the most appropriate AEs based on form responses.

For instance, companies with 1–10 employees are routed to our dedicated team that works with small businesses, while those with 1,000+ employees go to more senior AEs. Prospects in specific industries are automatically matched with AEs specialized in that vertical.

Experimentation is equally crucial in marketing. One exercise our marketing team frequently does is use heatmaps to analyze user behavior on high-traffic pages (homepage, pricing, etc.) and optimize based on the observed patterns. At Belkins, our overall conversion rate increased from 3% to 5% in 2024 after we ran optimizations with Clarity monitoring and did A/B testing. Chameleon has also had a remarkable 250% jump in homepage conversions using heatmaps.

Similarly, content marketing expert Erika Varangouli used Microsoft Clarity and heatmap recordings to understand how readers viewed a long-form content piece. After restructuring it to prioritize the sections most readers focused on, traffic increased by 50%. 

If you’re unsure where to begin, test your homepage messaging and cold outreach. Unclear website messaging frustrates prospects, and market shifts can make once-effective messaging obsolete. That’s why we A/B test cold outreach regularly and double down on what resonates most with prospects.

Create an omnichannel customer acquisition strategy

Omnichannel outreach is the only strategy that’ll get you enough opportunities to ensure pipeline predictability in 2025. Sure, if you’re an early-stage business with, say $1M–$3M ARR, single-channel outreach might work. But for a growth stage business, it won’t cut it. We learned this firsthand.

Until late 2023, we were cold-email devotees at Belkins. However, tough spam and security policies caused our response rates to decline, putting our pipeline goals at risk. That’s when we began developing our omnichannel approach, and its results speak for themselves. Since implementing it, our clients have gotten up to 200% pipeline growth, 20% lower CAC, 25% higher close rates, and up to 25% shorter sales cycles. 

Consider our collaboration with a U.S.-based startup investment platform, for example. Before coming to us, they juggled several pipeline-building vendors, yet their lead-to-conversion rate never exceeded 3%. Here’s what we achieved in 15 months:

• 346 appointments booked. 285 from email, 40 from LinkedIn, and 21 from calls.
• 9% lead conversion rate (3x more than previous vendors).
• 13 closed-won deals with about $150K in revenue.
• $434K of projected value from pending deals
• ROI of 125% so far (projected to reach 200%+) compared to the 107%–110% industry average.

📚 Learn more: Omnichannel outreach benefits for B2B

Build an indomitable brand

Founders like Matt Watson (Full Scale) and Peep Laja (Wynter) attribute 70% of their company’s revenue and demo requests to founder-led content across LinkedIn, newsletters, and podcasts. My favorite example is Alina, who swears by branding as a key factor in Chili Piper’s growth to $25M in ARR. 

I like Chili Piper’s approach because, like us, they didn’t focus solely on the company brand, the founder’s brand, or employee advocacy — they built all three. They nurtured Alina’s brand, empowered employees as brand advocates, and openly shared internal experiments on their company blog.

At Belkins, we’ve always invested 10 to 20% of our revenue in marketing and branding, even when the market is down. 20% of that budget goes into publishing expert-led blog content with insights from our in-house experts. Featured team members then share these posts on their socials, thereby amplifying their brands while boosting Belkins’ reach and awareness.

Our C-level executives — Michael, Vladyslav, and Brian — also build their brands through event appearances, newsletters, guest posts, and social media. Beyond that, we invest in our webinar, YouTube channel, podcast, and private community to reinforce Belkins’ brand. Our strong brand has won us multiple opportunities, making it easy to justify continued investment.

Many B2B companies treat brand building as optional, often cutting budgets when the economy dips. That’s a costly mistake because a strong brand is a powerful moat. Product features and marketing tactics can be copied, but a brand that owns mindshare is nearly impossible to replicate — which is often the difference between brands that thrive or fail, especially in times of economic downturn.

Empower your sales team with fresh ideas

Sales leader Jen Allen-Knuth shared a similar view on our podcast. She said, telling reps about someone who climbed Mount Everest is cool at the moment, But then I…

Jen further emphasizes that today’s buyers are more informed and harder to engage. Sellers need actionable ideas, not more pressure to send 1,000 more emails. At Belkins, we’re exploring several initiatives to help AEs build pipeline and engage prospects meaningfully:

• Leveraging leadership’s positional power. C-level and department heads engage with key stakeholders on LinkedIn to nurture relationships.
• Tapping into internal networks to open doors. This helps our AEs gain visibility and access to senior executives.
• Building AE personal brands. We let our AEs lead our industry webinars. We also feature their insights in our SEO articles.
• Enhancing problem acumen. We teach AEs to focus on the problem, rather than rush to the solution.
• Providing client references. We equip AEs with access to referrals, industry case studies, and client reviews to accelerate deals.
• Strengthening deal terms. Our delivery team estimates guarantees, thereby enabling sales to offer better contract terms and win more deals.

Leverage AE self-sourcing

Many sales leaders shifted away from AE self-sourcing, promising reps a steady flow of inbound and SDR-generated leads. Now, they’re realizing the need to get their sales teams back to hunting.

At Belkins, while most of our opportunities come from outbound, 80% of our marketing budget goes to inbound. We also have well-trained BDRs who pre-qualify leads before passing them to closers. Yet, none of this justifies stopping AEs from sourcing their leads. Why?

For one, AEs are far better suited for enterprise sales. As Jen Allen-Knuth pointed out in our interview, SDRs and BDRs often lack the business acumen to engage enterprise-level prospects effectively. 

Jen further explains the reason for this: Most SDRs don’t get the “right level of investment in their development to make them powerful at opening a door [and] that is the hardest job in my opinion in the sales process.”

Additionally, AEs tend to generate better leads. Unlike many SDRs who focus on booking meetings for the sake of it, AEs are revenue-driven. As such, AE-sourced pipelines often have higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, and larger deal sizes.

To be clear, we’re not saying AEs should self-source all their leads — most of their time should go into selling. But in tough markets, strong AEs step up and hunt when needed.

Run a customer success program that decimates churn

As go-to-market expert Hannah Ajikawo puts it, “Your existing customers are your future pipeline.” Satisfying your customers helps minimize churn and maximize your net recurring revenue (NRR). Delighted customers can become advocates who bring new business through referrals. The best part is that referred prospects close faster since they’re pre-sold on you.

The key to unlocking this pipeline generation channel? Ensure that customers get maximum value from your product or service. At Belkins, we ensure customer success using two core strategies.

First, we focus on what truly matters to clients — closed deals. While many lead generation companies settle for low-quality leads, we prioritize highly qualified leads with strong conversion potential.

Second, we proactively identify and mitigate churn risks using a Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gauge a customer’s likelihood of recommending us. 

A negative NPS triggers a structured response from the account manager and team to resolve performance concerns. This dedication has helped us achieve some great results.

1. We’ve worked with 1,000+ clients in 50+ industries
2. We have an average rating of over 4.8/5 across third-party review platforms
3. We’ve successfully launched SaaS products like Folderly.
4. We have one of the highest retention rates in the industry with only a 10% average churn rate.
5. We support 200 ongoing clients and create over 1,500 new deals for each of them.

Fancy working with us? Check our results or give us a call.